John Harvey: The Man Who Called the Revolution to Order

About eleven miles south of here lived John Harvey, the man who more than anyone else brought North Carolina's colonial government to a defiant stand against the Crown. Harvey served as Speaker of the colonial assembly and in seventeen seventy-three was named to North Carolina's first Committee of Correspondence, the network that tied the colonies together before the Revolution. When Royal Governor Josiah Martin refused to call the assembly into session, Harvey convened North Carolina's First Provincial Congress anyway in seventeen seventy-four, presiding as moderator in open defiance of the Crown. He died in the spring of seventeen seventy-five, just weeks after the battles at Lexington and Concord, never living to see the nation he helped bring into being.